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Roach believes Mayweather vs. Pacquiao mega-fight can take place in September

By Chris Williams: Call it wishful thinking, but Manny Pacquiao’s trainer Freddie Roach thinks that if Pacquiao gives promoter Bob Arum instructions to put together the Pacquiao vs. Floyd Mayweather Jr. fight for September then Arum will do it. Why anything would be different from the previous times they wanted to put this fight together is the question of the day.

With Roach believing that Pacquiao can simply tell Arum to go make the Mayweather fight happen, it leaves you wondering whether Roach has been living in a dark cave for the past 4 years, because it’s already been established that a fight between Pacquiao and Mayweather is pretty much never going to happen until Pacquiao does what Mayweather told him to do if he wanted a fight with him.

A Mayweather-Pacquiao fight should have happened in 2010, but we all know what happened there. Pacquiao couldn’t agree with Mayweather’s conditions for the fight, so he walked away and fought Arum’s Top Rank stable fighter Joshua Clottey in a fight that drew only 660,000 PPV buys.

“I think Arum being the promoter and the professional that he is, will give Manny that fight,” Roach said to sweetscience. “I like that September date, I’m pushing for it. I’m gonna call Manny this afternoon. All he has to do is call Bob, tell him who he wants, Mayweather, and I think it’ll get done.”

Pacquiao can call Arum, but that doesn’t mean the fight will get made with Mayweather. Pacquiao can call Arum until he’s blue in the face and tell him to make the Mayweather fight, but the chances of Arum being able to setup that fight are zero.

Pacquiao needs to sit Roach down and break the news to him gently about Mayweather saying that he’ll never fight Pacquiao as long as he’s promoted by Arum. Someone should have told Roach about this by now, because then he could have saved his breath in talking about telling Pacquiao to go talk to Arum.

The cold reality is that Pacquiao won’t be fighting Mayweather in September. He won’t be fighting him in 2014 at all, period. Who Pacquiao will be fighting in September will very likely come from this group of fighters: Ruslan Provodnikov, Tim Bradley, Mike Alvarado, or Mikey Garcia. That’s it. You can repeat most of those names for 2015 and 2016 if Pacquiao re-signs with Top Rank. The only fluctuation I see with this group is the possible addition of Terence Crawford to the list, and Brandon Rios being brought back as another retread candidate.